Artists Groups -
1954-1960
Spatialisme.Term coined in
1954 Gutai.
Japanese group of artists-1954 Kitchen Sink
school.English group of
painters -1954Colour field
painting.Term-1955LesPlasticiens. Canadian group
of artists-1955Semantic
art.Term-1957 Neo-Dada-1958Hard-edge painting.Term-1958Spur. German group of
painters and sculptors-1958Zero.International
group of artists -1958Arte
generativo.Style of
Argentine painting-1959Gruppo T.Italian group of
artists-1959Antipodean group.Australian group
of artists-1959 Gruppo N.Italian group of
artists-1959Neo-Dadaism
Organizers-1960Groupe de
Recherche d’Art Visuel . Group of artists
in Paris from 1960Nul [Dut.: ‘Zero’].Group of Dutch
artists-1960Situation.Title of an
exhibition of British abstract painting-1960

Croatian group of artists active in Zagreb from 1950 to
1956. Its members were the architects Bernardo Bernardi
(1912–85), Zdravko Bregovac (b 1924), Zvonimir Radic
(1921–83), Bozidar Rasica (1912–92), Vjenceslav Richter (b
1917) and Vladimir Zarahovic, and the painters Vlado Kristl (b
1922), Ivan Picel and Aleksandar Srnec (b 1924). On 7
December they united officially at the plenary meeting of the
Association of Applied Artists of Croatia (Croat. Udruzenje
likovnih umjetnika primijenjenih umjetnosti Hrvatske (ULUPUH)),
at which time they proclaimed their manifesto. The group was
formed to protest against the dominance of officially
sanctioned Socialist Realism and the condemnation of all forms
of abstraction and motifs unacceptable in Communist doctrine
as decadent and bourgeois. In its manifesto, Exat-51
emphasized that such an attitude contradicted the principles
of Socialist development, that the differences between
so-called ‘pure’ art and ‘applied’ art were non-existent and
that abstract art could enrich the field of visual
communication. The activity of the group was therefore to
spring from the existing social situation and, as such, to
contribute to the progress of society. The principal intention
was to attain a synthesis of all branches of the fine arts and
to encourage artistic experimentation. At the first Exat-51
exhibition in February 1953, held in Zagreb at the Hall of the
Architects’ Society of Croatia, works by Picelj, Kristl, Srnec
and Rasica were featured; the exhibition was later shown in
Belgrade. The group made an important contribution in helping
to free Yugoslav artists from predominant Stalinist dogmas,
and its members later continued to work in a more individual
manner, still adhering, however, to the main ideas set out in
the manifesto.

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Luminism

Term coined c. 1950 by the art historian John I. H.
Baur to define a style in 19th-century American painting
characterized by the realistic rendering of light and
atmosphere. It was never a unified movement but rather an
attempt by several painters working in the USA to understand
the mysteries of nature through a precise, detailed rendering
of the landscape. Luminism flourished c. 1850–75 but
examples are found both earlier and later. Its principal
practitioners were FITZ HUGH LANE, MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE,
ALFRED THOMPSON BRICHER, DAVID JOHNSON and Francis Augustus
Silva (1835–86). Several artists of the HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL,
among them SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD, JOHN F. KENSETT and
ALBERT BIERSTADT, painted works that could be considered
examples of Luminism, as did such Canadian painters as LUCIUS
R. O’BRIEN (e.g. Sunrise on the Saguenay, 1880; Ottawa,
N.G.).

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Matter painting.

Term applied to a style of painting that originated in
Europe in the 1950s, often abstract in form, emphasizing the
physical quality of thick impasto into which tactile materials
such as metal, sand, shells and cement might be added. More
specifically it refers to the work of Dutch painters such as
Bram Bogart and Jaap Wagemaker and Belgian painters such as
Bert de Leeuw (b 1926), René Guiette (b 1893)
and Marc Mendelson (b 1915). This expressive style was
not bound to any specific aesthetic and was used by each
artist to different ends. In Wagemaker’s Cruel Desert
(1965; Bochum, Mus. Bochum, Kstsamml.), for example, the
effect is violent and brutal through the incorporation of
teeth into the composition. The works of Guiette, however,
were more contemplative and abstract, intended as meditations
on the nature of painting and its materials, as in Work in
White (1958). Among the other European
painters in relation to whose work the term is often used are
Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier,
Rene Burri and Antoni Tapies.

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_____________Action Painting

In the early 1940s, an art movement arose in New
York that was inspired by the automatism theories of the Surrealists,
but at the same time driven by Expressionist tendencies. The work was
very distant from figurative art, and its subject matter was the
actual painting process itself. It became known as "Action Painting",
a term coined in 1952 by American critic Harold Rosenberg. The works
were produced with great speed to denote an urgency of communication.
While the spontaneity of the gestures created the results, the general
term "gestural painting" was used to describe them. Jackson Pollock
(1912-56) worked in this vein, pouring, splashing, and dripping paint
onto a canvas spread on the ground in an attempt to interact directly
with it. Franz Kline (1910-62), on the other

hand, used a decorator's flat brush to make sweeping black lines on a
white background with a gestural vehemence of great visual impact.
Sam Francis (1923-94) adopted similar methods to
Pollock,
using the drip technique on large canvases, but he achieved less
convincing results. Outcomes such as these demonstrated how. in the
absence of any real direction to the process, an artistic style based
on the combination of colours in varying ways ran the risk of becoming
reduced to decorative superficiality. However, a particular place in
the movement is reserved for Willem deKooning
(1904-97), who, while definitely a gestural artist. maintained an
essentially realistic stance. His paintings are energetic abstractions
that nonetheless display organic or biomorphic forms. The human figure
is a central theme: for example, in his Women
series, the shapes are just barely discernible, even though the brush
has distorted their form in its construction - or destruction - of
them. The figures seem close to disintegration and yet maintain a
haunting presence within the whirl of colour that engulfs them._____________

ACTION PAINTING IN ITALY

Action Painting found counter parts in Italy in the highly gestural
work of the artists Emilio Vedova (1919-2006) and MattiaMoreni (1920-1999). In the early 1950s.
Vedova began to handle the syncopated
rhythm of his geometric shapes with more ebullience, creating tension on
the canvas between contrasting elements. Moreni's style, on the other
hand, featured large brushstrokes in bright colours that ran over the canvas in a rampant frenzy, representing in their size and
thickness the psychological and physical energy that generated them.

Mattia Moreni
(1920-1999)

Untitled

AN 143 RD

Self Portrait

Emilio Vedova
(1919-2006)

Untitled

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Art Abstrait

Belgian art group designed to propagate abstract art. It was formed
in April 1952 as a successor to JEUNE PEINTURE BELGE by the artists
Jean Milo (b 1906), Jo Delahaut (b 1911), Pol Bury,
Georges Carrey (1902–53), Léopold Plomteux (b 1920), George
Collignon (b 1923) and Jan Saverys (b 1924), who were
joined later that year by Jan Burssens (b 1925) and Hauror. The
group first exhibited in 1952 at the Cercle Artistique in Ghent, the
Galerie Le Parc in Charleroi and the Galerie Arnaud in Paris and also
travelled to Britain. The following year it exhibited at the Palais
des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Association pour le Progrès
Intellectuel et Artistique de la Wallonie in Liège and at the Salle
Comité voor Artistieke Werking in Antwerp. The members of the group
had no unifying style or aesthetic apart from being non-figurative.
The abstract styles within the group ranged from thickly impastoed
informal works such as Carrey’s Composition (1953; Brussels,
Musées Royaux A. & Hist.) to hard-edged works such as Delahaut’s
Besoar (1953). In 1954 Delahaut, Bury
and the writers Jean Séaux and Karel Elno published a manifesto that
introduced the concept of SPATIALISME, thus marking the end of Art
Abstrait. Delahaut’s ideas about abstraction led to his co-founding
the group Formes with the writers Séaux and Maurits Blicke in 1956.
This was designed to realize the ideas of the Spatialisme
manifesto, as shown, for example, in the abstraction of Delahaut’s
Recall to Order (1955). Again
short-lived, the Formes group exhibited in 1956 at
Morlanwelz-Mariemont in Hainaut and in 1957 at the Galerie Accent in
Antwerp.

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Art autre
[Fr.: ‘other art’].

Term coined in a book published in 1952 by French writer
and critic Michel Tapié to describe the kind of art many
intellectuals and artists deemed appropriate to the turbulent
mood of France immediately after World War II. He organized an
exhibition entitled Un Art autre for the Studio
Facchetti, in Paris, also in 1952. Inspired in part by the
ideas of Vasily Kandinsky, by Existentialist philosophy and by
the widespread admiration for alternative art forms (notably
child art, psychotic art and ‘primitive’ non-Western art),
Tapié advocated an art that worked through ‘paroxysm, magic,
total ecstasy’, in which ‘form, transcended, is heavy with the
possibilities of becoming’. He wrote of the need for
‘temperaments ready to break up everything, whose works were
disturbing, stupefying, full of magic and violence to re-route
the public. To re-route into a real future that mass of
so-called advanced public, hardened like a sclerosis around a
cubism finished long ago (but much prolonged), misplaced
geometric abstraction, and a limited puritanism which above
anything else blocks the way to any possible, authentically
fertile future’. Although the term has been used more or less
interchangeably with ART INFORMEL and TACHISM as embodied in
the expressive and non-geometric abstract work of artists such
as Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux and
Wols, it also embraced
the more figurative concerns of artists such as Jean Fautrier,
Victor Brauner and Jean Dubuffet.

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Boom style.

Term apparently coined by Robin Boyd in Australia’s Home
(1952) and loosely applied to highly ornate architecture in a
classical idiom that was fashionable in the eastern states of
Australia between the late 1870s and early 1890s. The style
was made possible by, and is to some extent an expression of,
the financial boom that followed the discovery of gold in
1851. The climax of the boom was in the 1880s in Victoria,
where the richest goldfields were located. The buildings most
commonly associated with the Boom style are the richly
decorated Italianate villas and speculative terrace houses of
Melbourne. The English picturesque Italianate fashion had been
introduced to Australia by the early 1840s but only reached
its sumptuous apogee in Victoria in the late 1880s. The
architecture is characterized by asymmetrical towers,
balustraded parapets, polygonal bay windows and round-arched
openings and arcades, though the terrace houses often lack the
more elaborate features. The buildings were usually stuccoed
and enriched with mass-produced Renaissance-style elements in
cast cement. They frequently incorporate cast-iron filigree
verandahs, prefabricated in sections. A typical stuccoed villa
is Wardlow (1888), Carlton, Melbourne, by John Boyes. Other
Italianate Boom style work was carried out in rich
polychromatic brickwork, which was characteristic of
Melbourne. The other fashionable idiom commonly included in
the Boom style category is French Second Empire, employed for
example at Labassa (1890), a lavish house in Caulfield,
Melbourne, by John A. B. Koch, and the town hall (1883–5) at
Bendigo by W. C. Vahland. The Boom style rapidly declined
during the depression of the 1890s.

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Washington Color Painters.

Group of American painters based in Washington, DC, who
from the mid-1950s responded to Abstract Expressionism by
producing non-gestural, totally abstract canvases that
stressed the optical effects created by the interrelationships
of various colours. Named retrospectively in a survey
exhibition held in 1965, they worked in a number of different
styles including those loosely referred to as POST-PAINTERLY
ABSTRACTION, HARD-EDGE PAINTING and COLOUR FIELD PAINTING, but
all used acrylic paints. One of the most influential of the
painters, Morris Louis, moved in 1952 from his native
Baltimore to Washington, DC, where he met several like-minded
artists at the Washington Workshop for the Arts, founded by
local painter Leon Berkowitz (1915–87). Following the example
of Helen Frankenthaler, Louis began in the early 1950s to pour
extremely thin acrylic paints directly on to unprimed canvases
to produce ‘stains’ of overlapping, translucent colours. The
work of most of his colleagues, however, and particularly that
of Kenneth Noland, was characterized by hard-edged, geometric
abstract forms and especially by repeating patterns, such as
concentric circles and chevrons, from which Noland produced
series of works (Kenneth
Noland).
The third principal group member was Gene Davis (1920–85), a
native of Washington, who began painting in 1958 and quickly
developed his signature approach of narrow, vertical stripes
of colour that covered the entire canvas surface from edge to
edge. The other painters who participated in the exhibition of
1965 and continued to be associated with the group were Thomas
Downing (b 1928), Howard Mehring (b 1931) and
Paul Reed (b 1919)._____________

Kenneth Noland(American Abstract Expressionist Painter, born in 1924)

Horizontal Stripes (III-27)

Crepusculo

Shadow on the Earth

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Gruppo degli Otto Pittori Italiani.

Italian group of eight painters. It was formed in 1952
after the disintegration of FRONTE NUOVO DELLE ARTI. Six of
them had belonged to the earlier group: Renato Birolli,
Antonio Corpora, Ennio Morlotti, Emilio Vedova, Giuseppe
Santomaso and Giulio Turcato; the other founder-members were
Afro and Mattia Moreni (b 1920). The group, which
exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1952, was coordinated by
Lionello Venturi, who described its style as
‘abstract-concrete ...born of a tradition that began around
1910 and that includes Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction’.
Geometric or post-Cubist forms dominate these artists’ work;
however, the naturalistic colour and atmospheric luminosity of
such paintings as Vedova’s Cosmic Vision (1952; New
York, MOMA) and Birolli’s Brambles and Paths (1953;
Brescia, Cavellini priv. col.) typify this group’s leanings towards expressive
abstraction. During the 1950s Birolli, Corpora and Morlotti
became more involved with Informalism and Tachism, and
Santomaso and Vedova were significantly inspired by Hans
Hartung and Wols respectively. Of the eight, Afro was the most
outstanding exponent of lyrical expressionism, largely
achieved through his use of vibrant and transparent colour in
works such as Underwater Fishing (1955; Pittsburgh, PA,
Carnegie)._____________

Renato Birolli (1905-1959)Nudo

Antonio Corpora (1909-2004)Lagina sull'Argentario

Ennio Morlotti(1910-1992)Fiori

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Independent Group.

British group of artists, architects and critics. It met as
an informal discussion group at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London, from 1952 to 1955. Its members, drawn from those
of the ICA who were dissatisfied with the Institute’s policy
towards modernism, included the art critic Lawrence Alloway
(1926–90), the design historian Peter Reyner Banham (1922–88),
the art historian Toni del Renzio (b 1915), the artists
Nigel Henderson, Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, William
Turnbull and John McHale (1922–78), and the architects Alison
and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson._____________

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Quadriga.

German group of painters founded in 1952 in Frankfurt am
Main and active until 1954. The four members were Karl Otto
Gotz, Otto Greis, Heinz Kreutz and Bernard Schultze. When they
exhibited their most recent works under the label of
neo-Expressionism at the Zimmergalerie Franck, Frankfurt am
Main, in December 1952, the writer René Hinds (1912–72) coined
the name Quadriga, alluding to a Roman triumphal chariot.
Impressed by the spontaneity and form-shattering power of the
paintings, Hinds compared the works to a team of four fiery
racehorses in their victory parade. There was also the analogy
of the four artists breaking through audaciously after nearly
20 years of isolation from the international avant-garde. With
European and American movements such as Abstract Expressionism
and Tachism in Paris and the work of the Cobra group sharing
so many qualities, shortly after 1950 Art informel
developed as a universal language. The importance of Quadriga
was in the members’ roles as pioneers of Art informel
in Germany. However, the fairly loose connections between the
members led them to develop in different directions and
resulted in the group’s dissolution.

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Otto Greis
(German, 1913)Tuareg-Serie

Bernard Schultze
(1915 - 2005)Stunde des Pan

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New Brutalism.

Term coined by Peter Smithson in 1953 with reference to the
design by Smithson and Alison Smithson for a school (completed
1954) at Hunstanton, Norfolk. It was intended as a counter to
such terms as New Empiricism._____________

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New Empiricism.

Term coined in the 1950s by the editors of the
Architectural Review to describe the compromise between
traditional and modern domestic architecture developed in
war-time Sweden for large-scale social housing.

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Gruppe 53.

German group of painters founded in Dusseldorf in 1953 and
active until 1959. In 1953 some young Düsseldorf artists
banded together to form an association known as the Künstlergruppe Niederrhein, with a shared interest in art
informel and the intention of mounting exhibitions, in
opposition to the established artists’ association, the
Rheinische Secession. From 1954 the group emerged as Gruppe
53, with joint exhibitions held primarily in buildings owned
by the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, and every
second year at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. The
members included Peter Bruning, Winfried Gaul (b 1928),
Gerhard Hoehme, Horst Egon Kalinowski, Herbert Kaufman (b
1924), Peter Royen (b 1923), Rolf Sackenheim (b
1921) and Friedrich Wertmann (b 1927). Abstract artists
from outside Dusseldorf, such as Karl Fred Dahmen (1917–81),
Bernard Schultze and Emil Schumacher, were also invited to
exhibit with them, as were other Düsseldorf artists
representing various developing trends in painting. Thus
Konrad Klapheck, who worked figuratively, and members of the
Zero group, including Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Gunther
Uecker, exhibited with Gruppe 53. There was no common
aesthetic programming policy, although representative works
include Brüning’s Bild 2/63 (1963; Bonn, Städt. Kstmus.),
Gaul’s Good-bye to Rembrandt (1956–7; Saarbrucken,
Saarland Mus.) and Hoehme’s Black Spring (1956; priv.
col.). Economic and organizational interests formed the basis
of their joint action, along with the desire to establish
abstract art. All those involved painted in an abstract way
and rejected geometrically inspired ‘cold abstraction’. The
group received considerable support from the collector, art
historian and later gallery owner Jean-Pierre Wilhelm
(1912–68). He made contacts with gallery owners, especially in
Paris, and with artists from abroad. When the opportunities
for exhibiting abstract work by young artists in Düsseldorf
had improved as a result of Gruppe 53’s commitment, and when
other commercial galleries opened in addition to Wilhelm’s
Galerie 22, the reasons motivating the group disappeared, and
it was consequently disbanded in 1959.

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Painters Eleven.

Canadian group of painters. It was formed in November 1953
by 11 artists working in and around Toronto: Jack Bush, Oscar
Cahén (1916–56), Hortense Gordon (1887–1961), Tom Hodgson (b
1924), Alexandra Luke (1901–67), Jock Macdonald, Ray Mead (b
1921), Kazuo Nakamura (b 1926), William Ronald, Harold
Town and Walter Yarwood (b 1917). Seven of these
artists had shown their work together in October 1953 in
Abstracts at Home, an exhibition organized by Ronald at a
Toronto department store, the Robert Simpson Company; when
they agreed to combine forces with four others, they chose a
name that reflected their number and also made ironic
reference to the Group of Seven, the Ontario-based landscape
painters whose influence in the province was still pervasive
in the 1950s. The members of Painters Eleven, which disbanded
in October 1960, differed widely in background, experience and
ambition; they were united by their interest in contemporary
international art and in their belief that their need to
exhibit their work would be better achieved collectively than
individually. They felt isolated from the art of their own
time and frustrated by the control exercised over the limited
exhibiting possibilities presented by such art societies as
the Ontario Society of Artists and the Canadian Group of
Painters.

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_____________Tachism

The term Tachism was adopted in 1954 by the French critic Charles
Estienne to describe a way of painting characterized by taches,
or stains of colour, created by the splashing or spraying paint onto
the canvas. Georges Mathieu
(b. 1921) chose to express himself in this spontaneous way and
developed a technique of composing tangles of abstract marks in a
rapid semi-calligraphic style. Mathieu carried out a
number of his paintings in public with a sense of drama and panache
that anticipated Performance Art. In 1959, in front of an audience at
the Vienna meat market, he painted Hommage an Connetable de Bourbon
on a large canvas in only 40 minutes.
This instantaneous communication of a state of mind can also be seen
in the random, chaotic drawings of the German artist Wols (nom de
guerre of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schultze, 1913-51) who arrived in
Paris in 1932. Wols did not dedicate himself to Tachism until a few
years before his death, turning to paintings of fibrous tangles mixed
with patches and marks of colour. Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) could also
be counted among the tachistes. Fautrier gave his works a tactile
consistency by building uneven layers of tempera and glue, thickened with white, resulting
in intensely dramatic impastoed surfaces. In his Otages
(Hostages) series, this medium brilliantly evoked Fautrier's reaction
to the massacre of prisoners of war. His pictures gave an impression
of profundity and power.

Term coined
in 1954 in a manifesto signed by the Belgian painters Jo
Delahaut (1911-1992) and Pol Bury and the writers Jean
Séaux and Karel Elno to describe the work of Belgian abstract
artists who had been associated with ART ABSTRAIT. The concept
of Spatialisme arose largely from Delahaut’s initiative and
was expressive of his ideas, which were absorbed into another
group, Formes, founded by him in 1956. The artists associated
with the term never exhibited as a group. The manifesto, which
defined Spatialisme as ‘a concerted construction of forms
tending to give them a life and poetry of their own’, rejected
both Tachism and Abstract Expressionism as ‘disguised returns
to tradition’. Though claimed as entirely new, it was close in
spirit to Constructivism, calling for an abolition of the
barrier between major and minor arts and for the social and
economic integration of the artist.

Japanese group of artists, active between 1954 and 1972. It
was formed by 18 young avant-garde artists, led by Jiro Yoshihara, one of the founders of Japanese abstract painting.
Following Yoshihara’s guidance in creating an
anti-individualistic form of expression, the group started by
holding an open-air exhibition at the Ashiyagawa riverside.
The members began experimenting in performance art, for
example breaking through single-leaf paper screens and
creating other staged pieces such as San baso ultra-moderne
by Kazuo Shiraga (b 1924). This consisted of archers
firing at a theatrical set and was performed in Osaka in 1957. The group also practised kinetic
art, for example in Work: Water by Sadamasa Motonaga,
in which water was filtered through suspended fabrics at the
Second Open-air Exhibition in Ashiya in 1956.

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Jiro Yoshihara(1905-1972)Untitled1957

Kazuo Shiraga(b
1924)Tenrosei Byokansaku1962

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Kitchen Sink school.

English group of painters active in the 1950s. Its name was
derived from an article of 1954 by the critic David Sylvester
and is used to identify a brand of English realist painting
whose main exponents were John Bratby (1928-1992),
Derrick
Greaves (b 1927), Edward Middleditch (1923-1987)
and Jack Smith. These artists knew each other and exhibited
together but did not share a common programme or ideology.
Like the contemporary ‘angry young men’ of realist drama and
literature, they rejected their label. Their work represents a
distinctive but brief reaction against the élitism of
abstraction and Neo-Romanticism in favour of figurative social
realism, a reaction that found its most ardent voice in the
writings of the Marxist critic John Berger (b 1926).

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John Bratby(1928-1992)

Still Life with Chip Frier1954

The Toilet1955

Susan Ballam1956

Three Self Portraits with a White Wall1957

Baby in pram in garden1956

Derrick Greaves
(b 1927)

Girl with Flower

Falling I

Edward Middleditch(1923-1987)

Spanish garden

Winter

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Colour field painting.

Term referring to the work of such Abstract Expressionists
as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and
Clyfford Still and to
various subsequent American painters, including Morris Louis,
Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski and Helen
Frankenthaler . The popularity of the
concept stemmed largely from Clement Greenberg’s formalist art
criticism, especially his essay ‘American-type Painting’,
written in 1955 for Partisan Review, which implied that
Still,
Newman and
Rothko had consummated a tendency in
modernist painting to apply colour in large areas or ‘fields’.
This notion became increasingly widespread and doctrinaire in
later interpretations of ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, until the
movement was effectively divided into ‘gesturalist’ and
‘colour field’ styles despite the narrow and somewhat
misleading overtones of each category.

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LesPlasticiens

Canadian group of artists based in Montreal, active from
1955 to 1959. They announced themselves with the publication
of a manifesto on 10 February 1955 on the occasion of an
exhibition at L’Echourie, a coffee bar in Montreal. The four
signatories, who had begun exhibiting together in 1954, were
Louis Belzile (b 1929), Jean-Paul Jérome (b
1928), Fernand Toupin (b 1930) and Jauran (pseudonym of
Rodolphe de Repentigny, 1926–59); the text was written by
Jauran, who was influential as an art critic for La Presse.
The manifesto proclaimed the need for a return to order in art
in reaction to the prevalence of the subjective tendencies of
Abstract Expressionism; the group’s name was chosen in homage
to the Neo-Plasticism of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.

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Semantic art.

Form of painting associated primarily with the Italian
artist Luciano Lattanzi and the German Werner Schreib. The
term was launched in 1957 in a manifesto written by Lattanzi
for his exhibition at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London
and was coined to draw a parallel between their art and the
forms of language. The manifesto enumerated ‘eight
propositions’ and claimed that semantic art marked the decline
of individualism in art and abolished the distinction between
animate and inanimate objects. Prompted by ACTION PAINTING and
indirectly by Surrealism, it was based on AUTOMATISM. The
artist was required to execute drawings or paintings without
conscious intervention, so tapping the unconscious. The
resulting work would then comprise largely ‘natural signs’,
which could be contemplated and deciphered by the artist. As
products of an intelligible, rational universe, these natural
signs are comprehensible, although some might be so complex as
to defy adequate interpretation. Unlike action painting, which
used spontaneous means to unleash the individual psyche,
semantic art was designed to probe the universal structure
common to all objects. As in a language, the works are
composed of signs, the meanings of which depend on their
context and arrangement. These plastic signs are, however,
more ‘vital’ than their linguistic counterparts. The typical
style of semantic art in drawing and painting is a densely
worked pattern of such abstract shapes as circles, lines,
spirals and organic forms, for example Semantic Painting and Semantic
Drawing ,
both by Lattanzi. Schreib obeyed the same aesthetic but often
impressed abstract designs on to thick paste using a stamp,
producing such works as Arithmetic Organization

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Luciano Lattanzi(1925-1999)
Untitled

Werner Schreib
(1925-1969)Das Bild mit dem Kreuz

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Neo-Dada

At the end of the 1950s, the American art scene turned its
attentions away from the interior world of the artist, valued so
highly by the exponents of Action Painting, and began to concentrate
on the nature of objects. This change of direction does not mean that
the medium of painting was ignored, however. In the work of Jasper Johns, it played an essential role; only the intentions
were different. There was renewed interest in the Dada concept of the
"ready-made", in the basic value of objects or in their mass-produced
counterparts. Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) combined the gesture
implicit in Action Painting with fragments of everyday life, used
objects, stuffed animals - in short, anything that reflected the ways
of contemporary society. Jasper Johns(b. 1930), on the other hand,
used painting to reproduce banal, commonplace objects. Exemplary of this is the
series of Flags (1958). in which the pictures almost become
objects themselves, though they never totally renounce their own
intrinsic characteristics. In this mediation between a traditional
concept of painting and the poetry of objects, Neo-Dada represents a
moment in the passing from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.

Term applied to abstract paintings composed of simple
geometric or organic forms executed in broad, flat colours and
delineated by precise, sharp edges. The term was coined by the
Californian art critic Jules Langsner in 1958 and intended by
him merely as an alternative to the term ‘geometric
abstraction’. Generally, however, it is used in a more
specific sense: whereas geometric abstraction can be used to
describe works with large numbers of separate, possibly
modelled, elements creating a spatial effect, hard-edge
painting refers only to works comprised of a small number of
large, flat forms, generally avoiding the use of pictorial
depth. It is in relation to this type of painting,
particularly as produced by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly,
Kenneth Noland, Barnett Newman and
Ad Reinhardt from the
mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, that the term acquired
general currency. Characteristic of this style are
Newman’s
The Gate (1954; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.) and
Kelly’s
White Black (1961; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.)

_____________

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Spur
[Ger.: ‘track’].

German group of painters and sculptors founded in Munich in
1958 and active until 1966. The group’s foundation followed a
joint exhibition held in autumn 1957 in the Pavillon im Alten
Botanischen Garten in Munich by the painters Heimrad Prem
(1934–79), Helmut Sturm (b 1932), Hans-Peter Zimmer (b
1936) and the sculptor Lothar Fischer (b 1933). They
devised the group’s name in January 1958 when thinking about
the tracks of their own footprints in the snow. Their shared
goals related to their criticism of Art informel, which
they regarded as devoid of content and too private. With their
aspirations towards collaborative working and inclination
towards the figural as conveyed by the traces left by
gestures, Spur advocated art that asked itself social
questions. Conflicts between people as well as areas of social
taboo were represented and chosen as themes in an expressive
and sensual way. For their models, Spur used the dynamic
portrayals of human suffering in Late Gothic and Baroque
paintings of the Passion and the Expressionism of the Blaue
Reiter and Die Brucke. In the 21 points of their first
manifesto of November 1958 they rejected aestheticism,
technique as an end in itself and abstraction in art. The
members of Spur were encouraged and helped by Asger Jorn, who
in 1959 introduced them to the Galerie Van de Loo in Munich,
which thereafter exhibited and supported the group, as did the
artist and art critic Hans Platschek. In 1959 Spur was
accepted by the International Situationists in Paris, and in
1961 the group wrote their Januar-Manifest. The
Bavarian Ministry of Culture refused to allow an exhibition by
them in the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Six issues of their
magazine Spur were impounded. In February 1962 they
were expelled by the International Situationists, and in the
same year there were two court hearings resulting in prison
sentences for supposed blasphemy. In 1965 they painted
collaborative gouaches, and started to cooperate with the Wir
group; in spring 1966 the two groups were amalgamated to form
the Geflecht group. However, Prem and Fischer withdrew. In
1967 the Geflecht group (H. M. Bachmayer, R. Heller, F. Köhler,
H. Naujoks, H. Rieger, Sturm and Zimmer) exhibited
Anti-objects at the Kunstverein, Freiburg im Breisgau, and
participated in political Happenings. Differences of opinion
led to the dissolution of the Geflecht group that same year.

_____________

Helmut Sturm (b 1932)Komposition

Hans Peter Zimmer (1936-1992)Spuritaner

_____________
Zero.

International group of artists founded in Dusseldorf and
active from 1958 until 1966. Membership of this informal
association varied, but the core of the group was made by
Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and GuntherUecker. The range of art
produced by Zero members ran from monochrome painting to
Nouveau Réalisme, and to object art via kinetic art and light
art. The common element was found in young artists who wanted
to overcome the subjective expression inherent in Tachism and
Art informel, which was still strongly characterized by
post-war intellectual movements such as Existentialism. By
challenging the artistic ideas of the 1920s again (e.g.
Suprematism and Constructivism), it was hoped to find a way of
revitalizing and spiritualizing ‘concrete’ means of expression
that did not reproduce the old world but rather opened up new
forms of perception and levels of consciousness.

_____________

Heinz Mack(German, born in 1931)

Dynamische
Struktur

Untitled

Licht Zelt

Gunther Uecker
(German Sculptor, born in 1930)

White Mill

Lichtscheibe
1961

Planetarische Vision II

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Arte generativo.

Style of Argentine painting named in 1959 by EDUARDO
MACENTYRE and MIGUEL ANGEL VIDAL to describe their work, with
its power to generate optical sequences by circular, vertical
and horizontal displacement, and based on their studies of
Georges Vantongerloo. Developing the tradition of geometric
abstraction that had emerged in Argentina in the 1940s with
groups such as Arte Concreto Invención, Movimiento Madí and
Perceptismo, the aim of these artists was to extol the beauty
and perfection of geometry through line and colour. They and
the collector Ignacio Pirovano (1919–80), who acted as their
theorist, were soon joined by the engineer and painter Baudes
Gorlero (1912–59), who as well as creating his own work also
analysed its development mathematically. All three artists
were awarded prizes in 1959 in the Argentine competition
Plástica con plásticos by a jury that consisted of the
French critic Michel Ragon, the American museum director
Thomas Messer (b 1920), the French painter Germaine
Derbecq (1899–1973) and the Argentine critic Aldo Pellegrini
(1903–75), shortly after which Gorlero died. MacEntyre and
Vidal produced the Arte generativo manifesto in 1960,
not as a theoretical statement but as a ‘clarification of
ideas’. They distinguished the adjective ‘generative’ (‘able
to produce or engender’) from the verb ‘to engender’ (‘to
procreate, to propagate the same species, to cause, occasion,
form’) and from the noun ‘generatrix’ (‘a point, line or
surface whose motion generates a line, surface or solid’).
After exploring these ideas more fully they suggested that
shapes ‘produce power through the sensation of breaking
free from and wishing to penetrate the basic plane and
energy from the displacements and vibrations that they
produce’. Both MacEntyre and Vidal relied on an analytical
process, organizing basic units (curved lines for MacEntyre,
straight lines in Vidal’s case) in accordance with constant
laws and subjecting them to inventive variations characterized
by an impeccable technique, splendid colour and surprising
power.

_____________

Eduardo MacEntyre (1873 - 1932)

Pintura generativa

Pintura generativa

Sobre gris variation de 1 tema

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Gruppo T.

Italian group of artists. It was founded in Milan in 1959
and active until 1962. The founders were Giovanni Anceschi (b
1939), Davide Boriani (b 1936), Gianni Colombo (1937-1992) and Gabriele de Vecchi (b 1938). These artists,
who were primarily interested in kinetic art, first exhibited
as a group in 1960 in the Galleria Pater in Milan, where they
held six exhibitions entitled Miriorama 1–6, none
lasting more than a few days. In the last of these shows the
four founder-members were joined by Grazia Varisco (b
1937). Gruppo T’s works frequently invited the participation
of the exhibition visitor: for example, Boriani’s Magnetic
Surfaces contained patterns of iron dust that changed as
the objects were handled. By contrast the exhibits of a show
held at the Galleria Danese in December 1960 were powered by
electric motors (e.g. Rotoplastik by Colombo). The
group cooperated with other artists with similar aims,
including Gruppo N, at whose gallery, Studio N, in Padua they
exhibited in 1962. They also were supported by Lucio Fontana,
who presented an exhibition of their work at the Galleria La
Salita in Rome in 1961. Gruppo T’s last exhibition was at the
Galleria del Cavallino in 1962.

_____________

Gianni Colombo
(1937-1992)

Untitled

Installazione

_____________
Antipodean group.

Australian group of artists formed in Melbourne in February 1959
and active until January 1960. The founder-members were the art
historian Bernard Smith (b 1916), who was elected chairman, and
the painters Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd (b
1924), John Brack, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh. They were joined
subsequently by the Sydney-based painter Bob Dickerson (b
1924). Smith chose the name of the group and compiled the
Antipodean Manifesto, the appearance of which coincided with the
inaugural exhibition, The Antipodeans, held in the Victorian
Artists’ Society rooms in Melbourne in August 1959. The group’s main
concern was to promote figurative painting at a time when
non-figurative painting and sculpture were becoming established as the
predominant trend in Australia, as in the USA and Europe. To gain a
more prestigious venue to show their work, the group asked Smith to
enlist the support of Kenneth Clark, who responded by suggesting the
Whitechapel Gallery in London. The Gallery’s director, Bryan Robertson
(b 1925), received British Council support and made a selection
for an exhibition entitled Recent Australian Paintings (1961),
which featured the work of the group alongside that of Jon Molvig,
Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and others. Although the
members of the group had experienced much critical opposition, they
felt vindicated by their inclusion in this exhibition, which
established that contemporary Australian painting had a well-founded
and powerful national identity.

_____________

_____________
Gruppo N.

Italian group of artists. It was formed in Padua in 1959.
It included Alberto Biasi (b 1937), Ennio Chiggio (b
1937), Giovanni Antonio Costa (b 1935), Edoardo N.
Landi (b 1937) and Manfredo Massironi (b 1937).
The group gained notoriety in 1959 when Massironi competed
unsuccessfully for the Premio San Fedele, for which he
submitted a piece of cardboard that he had selected because of
the interesting optical qualities of its surface. During the
1960s Gruppo N played an important part in the development of
Op art in Italy. The work of Biasi, for example, included
geometric abstract reliefs with striking optical effects, such
as the Optical-dynamic Relief (Drops) (painted iron and
card, 1962; Padua, priv. col.); this
attempted to create an effect analogous to the patterns caused
by drops of water falling on a liquid surface. The group’s
gallery, Studio N, which opened in Padua in November 1960,
rapidly became an important centre for experimental art, music
and poetry. The group had its own room at the Venice Biennale
of 1964 and also participated in various exhibitions of
Arte programmata in Italy.

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Alberto Biasi
(b 1937)

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Untitled

Light prisms1962

Ennio Chiggio
(b 1937)Untitled

Manfredo Massironi
(b 1937)Untitled

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Neo-Dadaism Organizers.

Group of Japanese artists who showed at the Yomiuri
Independent exhibitions of the late 1950s and developed
‘anti-art’ activities modelled on those of the DADA movement.
There were frequent dissolutions and reformings, but the group
that formed in March 1960 included Masunobu Yoshimura (b
1932), GenpeiAkasegawa (b 1937), Shusaku Arakawa, Sho
Kazakura, Ushio Shinohara (b 1933) and Soroku Toyoshima
(and later Shintaro Tanaka (b 1940) and Shin
Kinoshita); with the exception of Tetsumi Kudo and Tomio Miki,
who associated with the group but never joined, it seemed then
to comprise all the major ‘anti-art’ artists in Japan.

_____________

GenpeiAkasegawa
(b 1937)Go, go, Thomason!

_____________

Groupe de Recherche d’Art
Visuel [GRAV]

Group of artists active in Paris from 1960 to 1968.
Eleven artists signed the original manifesto, but only six of
them formed the core of the group: Horacio García Rossi (b
1929), Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc,
Joel Stein (b 1926) and Jean-Pierre Vasarely, known as
Yvaral (b 1934). The group took its name from the
Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, founded in Paris in July
1960. Following the belief of Victor Vasarely (father of
Yvaral) that the concept of the artist as a solitary genius
was outdated, the artists’ main aim was to merge the
individual identities of the members into a collective
activity that would be more than the sum of its parts. They
also believed that ‘workers collaborating with the aid of
scientific and technical disciplines [would] be the only true
creators of the future’. The group exhibited in Europe within
the framework of the NOUVELLE TENDANCE movement, and it
successfully developed the logic of group activity through the
strategy of anonymity and the holding of collective events
called Labyrinths. From the outset, members of GRAV
adopted the principle of submitting individual work to the
consideration of the group as a whole, which would determine
its relevance to the overall programme. In 1961 they felt
confident enough to assert that ‘plastic reality’ was inherent
in ‘the constant relationship between the plastic object and
the human eye’. This conviction led them to experiment with a
wide spectrum of kinetic and optical effects, employing
various types of artificial light and mechanical movement as
well as optical or ‘virtual’ movement. In Assez de
mystifications!, the text that they published on the
occasion of the Paris Biennale in 1961, they sought to forge a
connection between their efforts to engage the ‘human eye’ and
their forthright denunciation of the élitism of traditional
art, which appealed to ‘the cultivated eye...the intellectual
eye’.

_____________

Francisco Sobrino
(Spanish, 1932)

Untitled1960

Pulsation H1965

Espace indelini1968

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Nul [Dut.:
‘Zero’].

Group of Dutch artists founded at the end of 1960 by
Armando, Jan Henderikse (b 1937), Henk Peeters (b
1925) and Jan Schoonhoven as a continuation of the Informele
Groep to which the same artists had belonged with Kees van
Bohemen (1928–85). It was named after its German counterpart,
the ZERO group, whose members Peeters met in 1960 and with
whom Nul exhibited frequently. The exhibition Monochrome
Malerei (1960; Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich) played a
part in the birth of Nul. The group was a reaction against the
expressionism of the 1950s. The artists turned against the
expression of emotion through painterly means. In place came
an attempt to represent space by means of uniform monochrome
fields of colour, as seen in the work of Yves Klein, whom
Peeters had met in 1960, and to manifest rational arrangement
by composing objects and materials in series. A work of art
was not allowed to be an illusionistic representation of
reality but should be a reality itself. This is evident from
the actual works: Armando’s nuts and bolts welded on to
plates, inspired by the welding techniques in shipbuilding;
the changing light and shadow play in the white reliefs of Jan
Schoonhoven; the series of objets trouvés by Henderikse;
the smoke-paintings of rain, snow and fog by Peeters.

_____________

Jan Henderikse
(b 1937)

Kurkenrelief
1960

Centeurelief
1966

PP 3 C
1965

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Situation.

Title of an exhibition of British abstract painting held in
1960 at the Royal Society of British Artists Galleries,
London. It resulted from discussions between several artists
grouped around critic and exhibition organizer Lawrence
Alloway (1926–90) about staging their own display of
American-influenced, large-scale abstract paintings, which
established commercial art galleries had been unwilling to
handle. William Turnbull brought other artists into this
circle through his association with the Central School of Art.
The 18 artists finally exhibited from the catalogued list of
20 included Turnbull and Gillian Ayres, Bernard Cohen, Harold
Cohen (b 1928), Robyn Denny (b 1930), John
Hoyland and Bob Law; Richard Smith was also due to
participate, but his paintings did not arrive from the USA in
time. Characteristic of the works shown, and one of the most
clearly influenced by the large scale and flat areas of colour
in American COLOUR FIELD PAINTING, is Bernard Cohen’s
Painting 96 (1960; Liverpool, Walker A.G.).

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Bernard Cohen
(born 1933)

Matter of Identity I1963

Floris1964

In That Moment1965

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